How was Haiti?

Last month I spent a week in Cap Haitien with a short-term medical team.  It was a powerful experience, deeply refreshing and challenging.  I am no expert, but here are some thoughts from that time:

                  The first thing that struck me stepping off the plane was the heat.  It has a force behind it from latitude, backed up by mountains behind the city that block the wind off the sea to create heat under pressure.  I heard it described as “walking through peanut butter that was warmed up in the microwave.”  This heat under pressure seems to affect many things: the musical, slurred French vowels of Creole, the tropical sense of “island time,” and the occasional bursts of frustration and protest.

                  There were the sights, smells, and the sense of desperation from absolute poverty.  The recent storms during hurricane season had led to an overflow of the sewage system, and a subsequent resurgence in cholera and intestinal worms.  The landscape around the city is brown and barren, and there is a sadness, hopelessness in the eyes of so many that you meet.  It reminds me that poverty is so much deeper than a lack of resources; it is a social, biological, spiritual disease/evil.

                  And in life on the ragged edge of survival, everything has meaning and purpose.  Food, water, shelter, medicine, security are not guaranteed.  I am humbled by the realization of the artificial dramas in which I play the leading role here at home: inconveniences and inefficiency in my work as an American physician, exercise as my right to relieve stress, artificial war/conflict through sports and television drama to fill a vacuum of meaning.  It is a reminder that these places on the edge are where I belong, not because I am noble, but because I am called, and perhaps because I am so easily distracted.

                  I have been taught that “It takes a whole world to know a whole Christ.”  Haitian Christians opened my eyes to a sense of spiritual reality that pervades all of life.  Speaking to pastors at each stop along the way, I would ask about the opportunities and challenges they and their churches face.  Each one of them turned to me, even standing amidst absolute poverty, disease, riots, and hopelessness, and they would speak of the spiritual forces of good and evil.  They could see clearly a deeper reality of which I have only glanced dimly, and have shuddered.  And their prayers sprang from a well of experience, their fellowship an honor I will hold proudly all my days.   

“But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere.” (2 Corinthians 2:14).